Juno

[Gamblour.]

it sounds more like the film somehow miraculously succeeds DESPITE itself. huge chunks of your review could be read as negative, and then you go and cut it huge amounts of slack. i'll have to see it.

i accepted Me And You And Everyone We Know for all its similar qualities. and w/o horse rejected Squid for same, so i don't know why he's hopeful.

It's not so much cutting it slack, rather the film seems to take on the challenge of featuring these characteristics that could be very annoying, played out, or cliche by now, and shows, maybe proves, that they all can be salvaged and meaningful. In a way, the film chooses to ride this line between nuisance and brilliance and shows it has balls (long balls).

And you provide a good example, I hated Me and You, though many seem to love it the same way I love Juno. Do you ever think if you saw a certain movie on a different day you would have a completely different opinion of it? I feel that way sometimes. With Juno, I just fell in love with these characters. I bet Rocket Science would fall into this category of the adolescent art film, but I didn't see it.

[Redlum]

I only really started to settle into Juno about halfway-in when the 'cleverness' of the dialogue subsided enough for me to properly appreciate the interaction of the characters. Perhaps this was just me becoming accustomed to Ellen Page's (and the script's) styling because by the end I had genuinely warmed to her character. It's hard to relate her to an everyday reality because she is supposed to be a unique teenager but certainly her dramatic scenes strip away the unnaturally cooler-than-thou vernacular and make Juno a much more interesting character than you'd expect.

In a way, the film chooses to ride this line between nuisance and brilliance and shows it has balls (long balls).

I think you may be right but I need a second viewing to make sure it isn't leaning to the former too much.

Jason Bateman came off as the funniest performance to me as well as showing some dramatic range that I haven't even seen him ever attempt (at least not since Teen Wolf 2).

[MacGuffin]

[Gamblour.]

Jason Bateman came off as the funniest performance to me as well as showing some dramatic range that I haven't even seen him ever attempt (at least not since Teen Wolf 2).

See, I dunno, his performance was just appropriately funny (Cera steals funniest performance, or maybe Juno's parents), but his dramatic range? I wasn't terribly convinced. It wasn't anything unlike what we've seen on AD.

[w/o horse]

it sounds more like the film somehow miraculously succeeds DESPITE itself. huge chunks of your review could be read as negative, and then you go and cut it huge amounts of slack. i'll have to see it.

i accepted Me And You And Everyone We Know for all its similar qualities. and w/o horse rejected Squid for same, so i don't know why he's hopeful.

I was thinking Little Miss.  Which I liked.

[Sleepless]

I was supposed to be going to a screening of this last night. I got my free preview ticket from Fox Searchlight, and headed off to the cinema, only to be told there was no preview there. So I don't know who messed up, but I wasn't too happy. Fortunately the manager there was really good and gave me free tickets to see another film instead. Apparently they do have a preview but not until December and the writers and director will be doing a Q&A.

[cinemanarchist]

Sleepless...If the theatre you were referring to was the Magnolia then that manager was none other than myself (small world.) I'm actually the Dallas PR person for Landmark but no need to split hairs. The Q&A screening will be on Thursday December 6th at 8pm and will feature Jason Reitman and Diablo Cody. I will put you on the pass list so just go ahead and show up that night and ask for Clayton. How's that for theatre service??? I think what happened was that Fox was going to book a screening here but since a film festival started last night we couldn't accommodate and they moved it to the Angelika but obviously not before they sent some passes out listing the Mag as the venue. Sorry for the inconvenience but it's always nice to meet a fellow Xixaxer and not even realize it.

[pete]

whoa fellow landmark slave!  I used to be one!  paper tickets!

[elpablo]

I was the same as Redlum. The first 15 or so minutes were almost unbearable for me. The quirky dialogue was way overdone in the beginning, but eventually it becomes part of the characters instead of a way to squeeze in a silly cameo by Rainn Wilson. I agree with a lot of what Gamblour said. I went into the screening expecting to be entertained for two hours by a film pretty much like all of the quirky "indie" films of the last 5 or so years that Gamblour listed, but it ended up exceeding those expectations. The way the characters speak in the film is kind of unnatural and unique to the world of the story, but it exists as a kind of shorthand that Juno uses to communicate with her friends and family. Bateman and Garner's characters don't speak that way because they're removed from her world. The dialogue works best in the scenes where Juno talks to them because it serves to show how contained and naive she is and how she's definitely not ready to have a kid. The language also speaks to the way that a lot of people today seem apprehensive towards honesty, masking everything they with a thick layer of apathy and sarcasm. This is very apparent in a lot of contemporary films, especially comedies (see Superbad). In Juno, that kind of language isn't just the screenwriter being afraid to come off as corny and sentimental, it's her characters feeling that way. And in the end, for me, the film is about these characters trying to break that barrier and learn to communicate with each other honestly. And it's great.

[MacGuffin]

Off the Stripper Pole and Into the Movies
By DAVID CARR; New York Times

IF you are a fan of the indie version of the human drama, it would be tough to top the one about the plucky Midwestern girl who used a stripper pole to shimmy her way up and out of a drab office cubicle and grab her piece of the Hollywood dream.

A few years ago, Brook Busey-Hunt was typing copy at a Minneapolis advertising agency and walked by the Skyway Lounge, a skeevy strip bar where desiccated women grind out a living a dollar at a time. Good Catholic girl that she was, Ms. Busey-Hunt saw an ad for amateur night and had a naughty epiphany. And the rest is, well, a stage name, a blog, a book and a screenwriting career.

Now named Diablo Cody, she wrote a screenplay that became "Juno," a film directed by Jason Reitman set for release by Fox Searchlight on Wednesday. The story of a maniacally verbal 16-year-old girl who becomes pregnant and decides to give the baby to a childless couple, "Juno" is on most every short list for an Oscar for original screenplay.

Sitting recently at the Rainbow, a restaurant on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles draped in rock history, Ms. Cody, 29, did not pretend that her life was anything other than a fairy tale, albeit one where the role of the glass slippers is played by a pair of stripper's stilettos.

"You make this really unexpected, half-cocked decision and all of a sudden it creates this weird energy that turns into something else," she said during lunch. A self-described geek who had led a very insular life, she said that getting naked for strangers was her version of self-improvement, a way of transgressing her upbringing and opening up other doors. Unlike many strippers who resemble balloon smugglers with very large hair, Ms. Cody is a crisscross of tattoos and post-punk fashion, sort of Suicide Girl meets Riot Grrrl.

Those trips down dimly lighted runways, followed by a short stint as a phone-sex worker — "You have to convince them that your parents don't know you are on the phone and that you are just aching to get with your physics teacher" — became an unmentionably titled blog. Mason Novick, a talent manager from Benderspink, a Los Angeles agency, came across the blog and eventually put her in touch with a New York literary agent, who sold "Candy Girl: A Year in the Life of an Unlikely Stripper," which was published in 2005. Mr. Novick suggested she give screenwriting a crack, and she bought a copy of the "Ghost World" screenplay so she could correctly format what became "Juno."

The movie has all the hallmarks of an art-house film — endlessly quirky dialogue with a soundtrack to match — but contains an old-fashioned moral center. At a time when many films about teenagers are a mess of machinations and hookups, "Juno" ends in a very tender hug.

Ellen Page, the young Canadian actress who starred in "Hard Candy," plays Juno, a teenager who can't get through a sentence without coining a metaphor. Juno becomes pregnant after a single sexual experiment born of ennui and friendship, and proceeds to waddle her increasing heft through the rest of the film while using her mouth as a plaything and weapon.

In one instance she turns it on Michael Cera (from "Superbad"), who plays her so-geeky-he's-sweet boyfriend. When she finds out he is going to the prom with a girl he admits "smells like soup," she is livid and trapped. "I am wearing a fat suit I can't take off. I am a planet," Juno says, a huge belly protruding under her vintage T-shirt.

Apart from the pregnancy, the character is heavily autobiographical, with her thrift-store fashions and kitschy taste; Ms. Cody's beloved hamburger phone gets a cameo. And like Juno, Ms. Cody has an ability to capture the human transaction between genders and generations. In Ms. Cody's case, she understands the nature of the compact between the demanding lout with a dollar in his hand and his objectified temporary fantasy. Stripping, she wrote in her memoir, required her to "bounce like the phantom cheerleader in the vault of every man's memory."

Ms. Cody smiles plenty, but she is all done preening for the benefit of others. She now prefers creating characters on the page as opposed to the stage. Especially after her first script fell into such eager, talented hands.

Her new life may not always be so sweet, but the work is plentiful. Her future includes another book; a pilot for a series about a woman with multiple personalities called "The United States of Tara," which was conceived by Steven Spielberg for Showtime; and several more features. (The Hollywood writers' strike, however, has put a temporary hold on her movie and television work.)

"I have never been an ambitious person, and my participation in this industry is a fluke, but only male writers can afford to be coy and self-deprecating," she said, her hand absently stroking a Hello Kitty necklace. ("Tarina Tarantino. I bought it for $75 at a trashy mall in the Valley. I bought $220 jeans that same day and my cheeks burned with shame.")

"I plan on hanging on to my soul, but I am not precious about writing," she added. "I am here to work and make money."

Mr. Reitman said Ms. Cody would do just fine in Hollywood.

"Just look at the name she chose for herself," he said. "Yes, this is a fairy tale, but she is going to jump on every opportunity that comes her way. Her writing is both original and real, which is very rare in Hollywood."

The blowback from such immediate success did not take long to materialize, including a suggestion by Rob Nelson, a hometown film critic who once edited her newspaper work, that she is a self-conjured confection. "It's as if the kid wrote her own Wikipedia entry before living it," he wrote in The Rake, a Minneapolis monthly.

While Ms. Cody said she was enjoying the success of "Juno," the criticism can sting. "Stripping toughened my hide," she said, "but exposing myself as a writer has been a lot more brutal."

Her hair may be a riot of colors — red is usually featured, but it can change almost depending on her mood — and she may have once made a living letting it fall in the faces of her lap-dance clients. But Ms. Cody has mastered the fan dancer's art of showing much and revealing little.

"I'm totally a person who hides in plain sight," she said. "I think there's a lot written about me being totally candid and outrageous, when I'm actually pretty cagey."

Part of the mystique came from an appearance promoting her book on "Late Show With David Letterman," during which she referred to herself as the "naked Margaret Mead." She went on to assert, "Everything is prostitution in a way."

As with her history as a do-me feminist, she makes no apologies for what she said. "I actually think everything is prostitution. We're kind of constantly bartering with our dignity in life," she wrote in an e-mail message after the lunch, adding that she always thought it was hilarious when strippers would draw the line at certain activities. "Same goes for people's ideas, talents, emotions, etc. There's a price on everything."

Michael Tortorello, who edited her when she brought her blog and writing to City Pages, an alternative paper in Minneapolis, senses a mixture of honesty and artifice in her transformation from Brook to Diablo.

"My impression is that once she started blogging and writing, it was if somebody popped a cork on a Champagne bottle and it has not stopped overflowing since," Mr. Tortorello said. "She is a sweet and honest person, but there is also a mythology, a kind of self-invention by someone who grew up in suburban Chicago."

Ms. Cody, who just moved to Los Angeles with her husband, Jonny, a graphic designer, has ambitions beyond writing. She said she would like to direct at some point, partly because she loathes the way women are portrayed in most contemporary films.

"The attitude toward women in this industry is nauseating," she said. "There are all sorts of porcine executives who are uncomfortable with a woman doing anything subversive. They want the movie about the beautiful girl who trip and falls, the adorable klutz."

Ms. Cody, who said she was less than graceful when she first went to work as a stripper, has her boots pretty firmly planted on the ineffable terrain of Hollywood.

"Obviously this is a very image-conscious industry, and I have mine to contend with," she said. "I answer a lot of questions in meetings here other people probably aren't asked.

"I show a little leg. But of course I am speaking metaphorically."

[polkablues]

It's a little tough to justify how much I liked this movie, but all I can say is that it made me really happy, from start to finish.  Maybe that makes me a 14-year-old Julie Taymor fan, but screw it.  I liked it a lot.  Maybe I'll try justifying that a little bit later, when I've had more time to think about it.

[Gamblour.]

There is nothing JulieTaymorfanish about it. It's an incredibly lovely film that left me crying and desperately wanting to see it again.

[Ravi]

During the pre-credits sequence I was thinking, "what the fuck is this," since the dialogue was too clever by half (especially Rainn Wilson's) but I really liked the rest of the film.  The adoption story was well-done.  You think you know what its going to be about but it turns out to be something else.  Top-notch acting. 

Factoid: Ellen Page has it in her contract that she has to wear a red hoodie in all her films.

I got a "Most Fruitful Yuki" t-shirt at the preview screening I went to.

[cine]

i'd probably know by seeing it a second time but somebody please refresh my memory: which song plays over the opening credits?

[modage]

i'd probably know by seeing it a second time but somebody please refresh my memory: which song plays over the opening credits?

All I Want Is You -- Barry Louis Polisar

track 1 on the Juno Sntk.